Page 92 of Just Not That Into Billionaires

“Right?” I say.

“I could never skip breakfast,” she says.

She arranges four perfectly buttered pieces of toast on a plate, flips six eggs over them, and brings it to the table. I sit next to her and watch her eat. She’s thinking about something, but she’ll tell me when she’s ready. We have time now. She’ll go on her tour, but that won’t be the end of things.

She takes care to get a specific amount of egg yolk on every bite of toast. She’s always been a deliberate eater, liking to portion things. It’s something I can definitely understand.

She feels me watching her and looks up.

“I want to never shut you out again,” I say.

“It’s okay if you shut me out of some things. Let’s not be a married couple that tells each other about their poop.”

“We can’t stay a married couple. Your tour—”

“I’ve made a decision about that.” A serious look comes over her face. “I’m going to the studio this morning, but not to attend class. I need to talk to Sevigny. I’m pulling out of the tour. I’ve been thinking about chocolate chip cookie dough.”

I barely understand what she just said. My mind spins with questions and concerns. “Pulling out?”

She just looks me square in the eye and says, “Yeah.”

“Francine,” I say. I reach out and touch her arm. “Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“You know I’m behind you either way.”

“Of course I know that.” She turns to me, holding her fork. “But for real, what am I doing? With my knee like this? Who am I fooling. Sure, maybe I could make it through the tour, but at what cost?”

I nod and wait, knowing she’s not looking for answers from me.

“I’ve been going after this specific vision of a ballet career for so long, it’s all I know,” she says. “It’s everything that I’ve molded myself to be. I’ve never questioned it because it’s what my brain wants and it has been forever, like I have five fingers on each hand and I’m gonna be an international ballerina. But what if it’s not what my heart wants? What if this ballet tour is like an instruction manual I wrote for myself fifteen years ago, and I’ve just been blindly following it all this time, never questioning it?”

“It’s always good to question.”

“I was thinking last night—what if I can make a dance at the ruins happen without Sevigny? If I can do it on my own terms? What if I blended my desire to dance at the ruins with teaching the class? What if I made it a class goal to do this amazing choreography based on the ruins, to get grants, to raise money, to make it happen? I feel like I can teach these girls dance, but also, how to do a big thing. It would be pure chocolate chip cookie dough.”

“A hundred percent,” I say.

“I always feel like everything has to be a struggle,” she says, “but why can’t my goal just be to have the chocolate chip cookie dough parts? I know I gave you that lecture, but I don’t apply it to myself all that much.”

“I love that vision,” I say.

“Right? It’s scary though. A sudden about-face like this?”

“Maybe that just shows it’s right,” I say.

“I know it’s right. Even so, I feel sad and even scared about it.”

I touch her arm. We’re in it together. That’s what my touch says.

She looks down at her plate and assembles another bite—a square of toast, a blob of bright orange egg yolk. “You helped inspire it all. Our conversation about your Juliana sale.”

“I’m definitely rethinking it.”

“Wait, what? You seriously are?”

“Yeah. Am I truly willing to trade a year of my time working in somebody else’s robotics lab just to get more zeroes in my bank account? Because who cares? I already have more money than I’ll ever spend. And it’s ayear of my time.Misery was an okay trade-off for a little more money before, but…I’m going to nix the sale,” I say. “Juliana and the gang are going to be unhappy, but nothing was in stone.”

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